My dad gave me my first journal when I was 10 years old. The first pages of the green canvas book with a cat on the cover were soon scribbled with oversized letters from a pink highlighter I had borrowed from his desk. I never stopped writing over the next seven years, filling the pages of new journals (without a cat on the cover) to the end with poetry, sketches, taped matchbook covers, concert ticket stubs, and my dreams of traveling the globe with only a guitar and a notebook that I’d use to write a book that would change the world.
Upon entering my first year at West Point, my feverish weekly writing took on a different tone than that of my youth. West Point is a metaphorical war zone in itself—at least it felt that way during the first few years of emotional, physical, and mental beatdowns designed to filter out those of weak character. I wrote in a notebook with a tie-dyed cover speckled with rock-and-roll stickers, and the pages were filled with stories of stolen freedom and rebellion mixed with pride, fear, insecurity, confusion, the best friendships of my life, and even love.
Every word was an exfoliation, an outlet for the expression forbidden to be worn on one’s sleeve in a military institution during duty hours. Such writing became a similar outlet while I was in Kandahar, Afghanistan, where my battalion was sent just a few months after the 9/11 attacks, and again in Iraq, where we were sent in April 2003.
We didn’t have cell phones. We were cut off from our lives back home. During downtime, instead of counting down the days until I could return home to safety, time was spent talking smack with comrades, taking photographs with old-school Kodak cameras, and, for me, writing in my journal. I wrote down the experiences as I lived them—experiences that posed questions I didn’t yet have answers to, that I could ponder later in life once enough distance and time separated us from the far-off lands to which we were sent. Those writings, in the present voice and without professional ambition, became the roots of a book that I wouldn’t finish until nearly 20 years later, rekindled by the inspiration I found in Ukraine’s war zone.
When you’re a writer, you write, regardless of where you are. And if that place happens to be within the boundaries of a war zone, a writer will still find a time to write in between the moments of adrenaline and fear. But the character of the writing—the voice—changes depending on how close or distant in time the writer is from those moments they are writing about.
In the immediate aftermath, when the brain and body are still coming down from the fight-or-flight instinct, the voice is of the present, like a documentary photograph—an accounting of the events as we witness them. But the more time that separates us from these moments, the more space we have for reflection and introspection over what we have already written, whether weeks or years before. Just as I do when looking at the old photographs that I took in Afghanistan and Iraq, understanding so much more now than I did when I captured the immediacy of the moment.
On Ukraine’s front line in 2018, where I first began documenting the ongoing war against Russia’s 2014 invasion—the same war that continues today, which many mistakenly believe began in 2022—it was much like how I wrote in Afghanistan or in Iraq, but with a different set of eyes. I was again writing in the immediate aftermath of those adrenaline-rushed moments of war, but not within the boundaries of the war zone. That was reserved for my camera.
This time, I was writing from a place of safety, in my journal on the express train from Kostyantynivka back to Kyiv—a place that was once considered the part of the country where one could live the “peaceful” life—or during the following days in my flat as I took the rest of the story to the keyboard. And after over a decade separated me from my war deployments and service commitment in the active-duty army, I was able to write without questioning the purpose of why I was there, such as I had in the wars to which I was sent as a soldier. I knew the story I wanted to tell. A story about what it meant to fight for something from within. About these men and women in Ukraine who weren’t under a contract to fight in a war, who weren’t paid, who risked their lives to protect their land, civil rights, and dreams of a better future.
I wrote of when Kyiv was a place we considered peaceful, before Russia’s full-scale invasion began on February 24, 2022. Back then, the front line was well-defined and mostly static, an area in eastern Ukraine whose inhabitants—whether they were soldiers manning Ukraine’s defensive positions or civilians living in proximity—knew the risks of staying. But after that day, and even now, there is no such thing as a peaceful life anywhere in Ukraine, only ever-shifting front lines of invasion in the north, south, and east, where one is within range of artillery and ground attacks, and all 600,000 square kilometers of the entire country—even cities and villages bordering the EU—are subject to attacks by long range missiles, fighter jets, or drones at any given moment.
Before that day, I envisioned an ending to this book in which the community of fighters I spent years documenting could share the same understanding: that their war, fought on their own border, would finally end, that they could then move on and change the world in ways that far surpassed the purpose so many spent years fighting for—a purpose for which they lost so much. Until the 2022 invasion, when the ending I envisioned fell into an abyss.
There was no time to reflect anymore, only to react. When I did find the spare time to write, the writing was immediate and raw, without closure. I was no longer a spectator of Ukraine’s war, traveling to and from the front line from my peaceful life as a photojournalist staying in Kyiv—Ukraine was now my home, the soldiers my community. I was in the center of it all, driving supplies from Poland to the soldiers in Ukraine whose lives I spent years documenting as the air sirens blared. I watched the people who filled the pages I had written before the invasion, many of whom had become my friends, fall in real time. When I tried to envision an ending to my book, I found that I couldn't anymore. It was all too close.
But now, more than two years later, I’ve finally found enough physical and psychological distance from the war to begin to reflect upon it all, a luxury those still fighting on the front lines are not afforded. And for the first time, I’ve realized that stories written in a war zone––and perhaps all stories written about war––aren’t meant to have simple, well-defined endings.
J.T. Blatty is a U.S. Army combat veteran, documentary photojournalist, and author of Snapshots Sent Home: From Afghanistan, Iraq, Ukraine—A Memoir (Elva Resa, 2024).
